The invention relates to a method and system for detecting people wearing burka in video images. The method includes obtaining a moving foreground region by means of a Gaussian mixture background modeling method; performing target feature extraction in the moving foreground region; classifying the target features by a classifier and detecting whether there is pedestrians in the moving foreground region; identifying the pedestrians wearing black clothes from the detected pedestrians by means of a color filter, extracting the edge information of the pedestrians wearing black clothes to obtain the burka features, and classifying the pedestrians; detecting the classification results of the pedestrians by means of a face detection algorithm and marking the targets whose faces are not completely detected; and performing tracking detection of the marked targets, determining the moving direction of the marked targets with the exception of the back in the opposite direction, and determining the targets facing a camera to move to be the burka target people and sending an alarm. Therefore, an effective detection means can be provided for the detection of people wearing burka in the video image.